In the Heat of the Summer. Michael W. Flamm
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for now Goldwater retired to his headquarters at the Mark Hopkins Hotel, where he answered questions from reporters and stressed his determination to make law and order a centerpiece of his fall campaign. “I think law, and the abuse of law and order in this country, the total disregard for it, the mounting crime rate is going to be another issue” he said, “at least I’m going to make it one because I think the responsibility for this has to start someplace and it should start at the Federal level with the Federal courts enforcing the laws.”45
Goldwater then cited a New York case in which a woman who had defended herself with a knife against a rapist was facing possible criminal charges while her assailant would probably go free. “That kind of business has to stop in this country,” he said, “and as the President, I’m going to do all I can to see that women can go out in the streets of this country without being scared stiff.” In fact, the rates of murder and rape in Phoenix were substantially higher than in New York, as Democrats would hasten to note in coming days.46
For the moment, however, the top Democrat was silent, almost certainly by design. During a light day of staged domesticity, Johnson in the morning visited the Tidal Basin, where he and Lady Bird viewed the Darlington Oak Tree, which she hoped to plant on the South Lawn of the White House. In the afternoon, the two took a carefully orchestrated stroll from the White House to Decatur House and then through Lafayette Park. In the evening, the First Lady appeared while the president was reading a newspaper. “What time are you going to eat dinner?” he asked. “The minute you are ready,” she replied. “What are your plans for later?” Johnson said he had some mail to sign and would join her in thirty to forty minutes.47
But first the president had one more call to make—to former Senator Ernest “Mac” McFarland, chairman of the Arizona delegation to the Democratic Convention. His surprising loss to Goldwater in 1952 had lifted the conservative Republican to national prominence—but had also opened the door for Johnson, who at forty-six became the youngest Majority Leader in American history when the Democrats regained control of the Senate after the 1954 elections. Now the two old colleagues shared reminiscences as they prepared to watch Goldwater accept the GOP nomination in a few hours.
“Gosh, this fellow you sent up here has caused us a lot of problems,” said the president. “Well, I know what you’re talking about,” chuckled McFarland, who had failed to unseat Goldwater in 1958 despite winning races for governor in 1954 and 1956. “He caused me some.” Then the two men got down to business: Would the president like him to make a statement to the press about Goldwater, given their history? McFarland thought it was a bad idea, but said “if you want me to make one I will and I’ll say whatever you want me to say.” Johnson demurred since he had already informed reporters that he would make no comment at this time: “I just told ’em I was going on sawing my wood and doing my work.”48
But the president was clearly annoyed by Goldwater’s charges. “He’ll call me a faker and he called me a phony and a lot of ugly names, but I didn’t have anything to say about him,” Johnson maintained. “And so I noticed he backed up this morning and said he didn’t want to engage in any personalities.” McFarland was sympathetic—and skeptical. “Well, last night he said there might be a few brickbats,” he noted. Johnson, however, remained adamant: “I’m just going to let him go and we’re going to give him lots of rope.”49
After dinner with the First Lady the president retired for the evening. Presumably, he watched Goldwater’s speech, which began at 11:20 EST on Thursday night, but no aides were present to record his immediate reaction. On Friday morning, as organized protests began in New York, Johnson traveled to his ranch outside Austin for the weekend. From there he phoned special assistant Bill Moyers, who at his request read back to him Goldwater’s already-notorious claim that extremism in the defense of liberty was no vice. “Well, extremism to destroy liberty is,” responded the president. Offering a window into how he viewed the speech, he informed Moyers that he wanted to issue “a balanced statement, not a vicious, violent Goldwater one.”50
Back in the White House, Goldwater’s address and comments to the press about crime and race set off alarm bells. In private, aides worried about an anti–civil rights reaction by whites. “I am disturbed about the continued demonstrations and what I see on radio and TV,” wrote an official. “I am convinced that a great deal of the Negro leadership simply does not understand the political facts of life, and think that they are advancing their cause by uttering threats in the newspapers and on TV. They are not sophisticated enough to understand the theory of the backlash unless they are told about it by someone whom they believe.” Another staffer urged Johnson to initiate a dialogue with Wilkins, CORE leader James Farmer, and other civil rights leaders as soon as possible, which the president would do the week after Harlem exploded.51
But for now Johnson expressed optimism in public. On July 18, the Saturday after the Republican Convention, the president stated at a news conference on his Texas ranch that the United States did not possess, need, or want a national police force, which would contradict Goldwater’s belief in limited government. “If we are going to give the federal government the responsibility for all law enforcement, in the cities and towns, even here in the hill country,” Johnson said, “I would think that the people would believe that it would do more than anything else to concentrate power in Washington.”52
The response was carefully crafted and fully indicative of the confidence the president felt as the polls showed him with a large lead. But at that moment he had no inkling of the storm brewing in Central Harlem.
CHAPTER 2
THE GREAT MECCA
Drunk with the memory of the ghetto
Drunk with the lure of the looting
And the memory of the uniforms shoving with their sticks
Asking, “Are you looking for trouble?”
—Phil Ochs, “In the Heat of the Summer”
1873–1963
In the summer of 1933, Bayard Rustin made his first visit to Harlem. A tall and handsome young man with a restless mind, athletic build, and musical talent, he was born in Pennsylvania in 1912, the son of unmarried parents he never really knew. He was raised mostly by his grandmother, who was educated in integrated Quaker schools and influenced by Quaker ideas. But she could not shelter him from the realities of the world. One of Rustin’s earliest brushes with discrimination came when, as a member of the West Chester High School football team, he was denied service in a restaurant in the nearby town of Media and decided to stage his own sit-in, three decades before the famous Nashville protests of 1960. “I sat there quite a long time,” he noted later, “and was eventually thrown out bodily. From that point on, I had the conviction that I would not accept segregation.”1
After his first year at Wilberforce University in western Ohio, Rustin came to New York to see his aunt, a teacher who lived in Harlem. By then the Great Depression was in full force—only months earlier newly elected Franklin Roosevelt had taken the oath of office and assured the nation that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” But pure excitement was the twenty-one-year-old Rustin’s initial reaction when he arrived in Harlem. “A totally thrilling experience,” he recalled. “I’ll never forget my first walk on 125th Street.… I had such a feeling of exhilaration.”2
New arrivals often had a similar response because 125th Street was the main artery of Central Harlem, the historic and symbolic heart of black America. Stretching roughly from 110th Street (the northern border of Central Park) to 145th Street, Fifth Avenue to Morningside Park and St. Nicholas Park, the neighborhood was overwhelmingly African American. By contrast, East Harlem and Spanish Harlem were more mixed, with large numbers of Italian Americans, Jewish Americans, and Puerto Ricans.
“Harlem is indeed the great Mecca for the sight-seer, the pleasure-seeker, the curious, the adventurous, the enterprising, the ambitious, and the talented of the whole Negro world,” James Weldon Johnson, the noted author, poet, lawyer,